Still – as he’d pointed out to her when he first saw it from the lonely ocean road – it would be easy to torch and simple to rob, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. (She’d looked at him as though he were mad, but then kissed him.)
That vulnerability intrigued and troubled him. There was a likeness to her there; to her as a poet and as a woman. It was similar, he suspected, to one of her images; the symbols and metaphors she used in the poems he loved to hear her read out loud but could never quite understand (too many cultural allusions, and this baffling language he had not yet fully understood, and still sometimes made her laugh with). Their physical relationship seemed to him at once more whole and complete, and more defyingly complex than anything similar he had known. The paradox of love physically incarnate and the most personal attack being the same thing tied knots in him, sometimes sickened him, as in the midst of this joy he fought to understand the statements and promises that might be being implied.
Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so (‘Zakalwe,’ she would say, when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck, and stare out from the rumbustious black tangle of her hair, ‘You have serious problems.’ She would smile), but the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.
But he tried not to let it bother him; at any time he could simply look at her and wrap his adoration for her around himself like a coat on a cold day, and see her life and body, moods and expressions and speech and movements as a whole enthralling field of study that he could submerge himself in like a scholar finding his life’s work.
(This was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more like the way it’s suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the other man… But he tried not listen to that voice.)
They’d met in a port bar. He’d just arrived and thought he’d make sure their alcohol was as good as people had said. It was. She was in the next dark booth, trying to get rid of a man.
You’re saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)
No, he heard her say. I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that. She sounds interesting. Wonder what she looks like?
He stuck his head round the corner of the booth and looked in at them. The man was in tears; the woman was… well, lots of hair… very striking face; sharp and almost aggressive. Tidy body.
‘Sorry,’ he told them. ‘But I just wanted to point out that “Nothing lasts forever” can be a positive statement… well, in some languages…’ Having said it, it did occur to him that in this language it wasn’t; they had different words for different sorts of nothing. He smiled, ducked back into his own booth, suddenly embarrassed. He stared accusatorily at the drink in front of him. Then he shrugged, and pressed the bell to attract a waiter.
Shouts from the next booth. A clatter and a little shriek. He looked round to see the man storming off through the bar, heading for the door.
The girl appeared at his elbow. She was dripping.
He looked up into her face; it was damp; she wiped it with a handkerchief.
‘Thank you for your contribution,’ she said icily. ‘I was bringing things to a conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, not at all.
She took her handkerchief and wrung it out over his glass, dribbling. ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘too kind.’ He nodded at the dark spots on her grey coat. ‘Your drink or his?’
‘Both,’ she said, folding the kerchief and starting to turn away.
‘Please; let me buy you a replacement.’
She hesitated. The waiter arrived at the same moment. Good omen, he thought. ‘Ah,’ he said to the man. ‘I’ll have another… whatever it is I’ve been drinking, and for this lady…’
She looked at his glass. ‘The same,’ she said. She sat down across the table.
‘Think of it as… reparations,’ he said, digging the word out of the implanted vocabulary he’d been given for his visit.
She looked puzzled. ‘”Reparations”… that’s one I’d forgotten; something to do with war, isn’t it?’
‘Yep,’ he said, smothering a belch with one hand. ‘Sort of like… damages?’
She shook her head. ‘Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar.’
‘I’m from out of town,’ he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light years of the place.
‘Shias Engin,’ she nodded. ‘I write poems.’
‘You’re a poet?’ he said, delighted. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by poets. I tried writing poems, once.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed and looked wary. ‘I suspect everyone does, and you are…?’
‘Cheradenine Zakalwe; I fight wars.’
She smiled. ‘I thought there hadn’t been a war for three hundred years; aren’t you getting a little out of practice?’
‘Yeah; boring, isn’t it?’
She sat back in the seat, took off her coat. ‘From just how far out of town have you come, Mr Zakalwe?’
‘Aw heck, you’ve guessed,’ he looked downcast. ‘Yeah; I’m an alien. Oh. Thank you.’ The drinks arrived; he passed one to her.
‘You do look funny,’ she said, inspecting him.
‘ “Funny”?’ he said indignantly.
She shrugged. ‘Different.’ She drank. ‘But not all that different.’ She leaned forward on the table. ‘Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders aren’t humanoid, but a lot are. How come?’
‘Well,’ he said, hand at his mouth again, ‘It’s like this; the…’ he belched. ‘… the dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are… its food, and its food keeps speaking back to it. That’s why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae’s last meals repeating on them.’
She grinned. ‘That simple, is it?’
He shook his head. ‘Na; not at all. Very complicated. But,’ he held up one finger. ‘I think I know the real reason.’
‘Which is?’
‘Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?’ He knocked the glass on the table. ‘Loads of stuff; but much of it alcohol.’ He drank from the glass. ‘Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.’
‘It’s all starting to make sense now,’ she agreed, nodding her head and looking serious. She looked inquisitively at him. ‘So, why are you here? Not come to start a war. I hope.’
‘No, I’m on leave; come to get away from them. That’s why I chose this place.’
‘How long you here for?’
‘Till I get bored.’
She smiled at him. ‘And how long do you think that will take?’
‘Well,; he smiled back, ‘I don’t know.’ He put his glass down. She drained hers. He reached out for the button to call the waiter, but her finger was already there.
‘My turn,’ she said. ‘Same again?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Something quite different, this time, I feel.’
When he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to her, he found himself starting at the larger facts – her beauty, her attitude to life, her creativity – but as he thought over the day that had just passed, or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps, a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said; that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.